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To cite this article: Jean Franco (1986) Death camp confessions and resistance to violence in Latin America, Socialism and
Democracy, 2:1, 5-17, DOI: 10.1080/08854308808427947
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08854308808427947
Jean Franco
I V l y argument in this paper concerns the fact that repressive modernization in Latin America has brought about a re-examination of certain
terms which had yoked class or economic systems with cultural and
political systems as if they were inseparable. I refer to the yoking of
democracy as the political system that inevitably accompanies
capitalism, to the yoking of the family to patriarchy and the yoking of
masculinity to the public sphere. The terrible and traumatic events of
the past few years in Central America and the Southern Cone have made
it evident that "modernization" is a euphemism for escalated economic
exploitation based on severe repression.
As a preface to my argument, I want to take off from an observation
made by Jacobo Timmerman in his book, Prisoner without a Number, Cell
without a Name (1981), in which he explained that his torturers tried to
"create a different more sophisticated image of the places of torture. As
if by this means, they might give a more elevated status to their activities, raise it to sort of high-level professional category . . . Their
military superiors encourage that fantasy in them and in others and that
idea of important places, exclusive methods, original techniques, new
apparatuses, allows them to claim a touch of distinction or institutionalization for their world." Timmerman accutely observes the
sordid and archaic basement on which the appearance of a "modern"
institution is built. Because the term "modernization" is a euphemism,
it is important to explore the hidden assumptions behind this term
which obviously valorizes the modern over the so-called primitive. It is
ethnocentric to the core and handily replaces questioned terms such as
civilization as against barbarism, Christianity as against paganism. The
procedures and myths, however, go back to the conquest and have
changed little since the sixteenth century, as can be readily observed not
only in the death camps but also in modern mass culture which has
continued to rewrite the myths of conquest and empire, scarcely diverging from the classical forms in which they were first generated in earlier
phases of imperialism from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.
Greystoke and The Emerald Forest bring back the noble savage much as the
Jesuits conceived that figure in the seventeenth century colonization of
the Americas. Fitzcarraldo retells the epic of conquering the Amazon on
behalf of a superior high culture. The Indians who were killed during
the making of the film are not mentioned in the credits. From the
colonizing savagery of Rambo, which vies with the popular imperialist
fiction of nineteenth-century England, to bad conscience movies like
Apocalypse Now and Under Fire which make the colonized world the scene
of metropolitan heart-searching, what is going on is the same old frontier war. Fennimore Cooper's characters and Bulldog Drummond are
etched deep, not in a political unconscious as Jameson would have it,
but as part of a dynamic ethnocentric discourse which is continuously
reproduced not only in popular art but in academic and cultural institutions, as was recently seen in the Primitive/Modern exhibition at the
Museum of Modern Art.
Let no one think that I am here setting up an authentic third world
in opposition to the metropolis. The third world is not a place but a
shifting frontier along which a war explodes wherever the modernization bulldozer appears. In his book The Country and the City (1973),
Raymond Williams traces a European landscape that still bears the
marks of this struggle, as does Marshall Berman, in his All that is solid
melts into air. What is being crushed is not rural purity or authenticity,
however, but heterogeneity, certain kinds of subjects and practices
which are obstacles to modernity. Violence in Latin America is thus not
an aberrant form of nationalism, not Argentine violence as Timmerman
would have it, or Salvadoran violence as Joan Didion would have it.
Violence is the explosion that comes with the shock of the new, with the
harnessing of the archaic with modern technology without the alleviation of any kind of participation.
It is worth remembering that even during the colonial period, Viceregal society aimed not only at changing indigenous beliefs but also at
incorporating difference on condition that it was converted into style.
This "mythological" practice whose discovery is generally attributed to
Roland Barthes was in fact the inspired invention of Franciscans and
Jesuits. Thus emblems of Aztec emperors along with classical heroes
decorated the arches which welcomed the new viceroys by providing a
conflict-free, pluralistic collage. Latin American independence initiated
a different kind of universality under the banner of progress; the complicity of this civilization with empire has been charted by Norbert
Elias (1978) and does not need to be repeated. What is important to
Jean Franco
This model of autonomywhether literary or politicalwas undermined by events in the late sixties and the seventiesthe inability of
Cuba to remain outside East/West politics, the overthrow of Allende,
and the institution of death camp regimes in the Southern Cone and
Central America whose aim was the pacification of a population that
had not docilely accepted the inevitability of consumer society. The
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ture undoubtedly recruit such people. But madness is too easy an explanation. We have to ask ourselves what circumstances make it possible
for torture squads to operate in the way they do.
One answer is provided by the manner in which torturers are incorporated into torture squads through rituals which have much in common with schoolboy rituals. There are hundreds of literary accounts
from all over the world of such rituals which are commonly associated
with an evil "other" who must be eliminateda tribal enemy, a ferocious animal, or simply an effeminate schoolfellow. The denigration of
this "other" usually involves his reduction to the status of the devalued
woman. These casual rituals of cruelty which have marked the adolescence of many young men even in liberal societies are formalized, even
bureaucratized in the death camps. The confessions of a Chilean security agent and of Argentinian torturers make clear that the pact of
blood is what makes torture possible, i.e. the witnessing of torture and
killing, or the performance (this is particularly true in El Salvador and
Guatemala) of acts of disembowelling or mutilating in order to secure
group bonding. During torture sessions in Argentina, there were often
jokes, laughter, music and sadistic excitement. There are many accounts of such "exaltation," the sense of being god and having absolute
power over people.
The association of sexuality with torture is striking. Electroshock was
commonly applied to the testicles, to the breasts and the vagina in the
case of women. The prisoner's body became the focus of his or her
entire attention. Hernn Valds's Diary of a Chilean Concentration Camp
(1975), written just after his release from Tejas Verdes, describes how
the brutalization of prisoners reduces their thinking to an exclusive
concern with bodily functions. "My body was aching terribly. I didn't
dare look at my penis. I was scared to." A prisoner who was no longer
regarded as dangerous because he had been reduced to a vegetable was
still submitted to ritual humiliation which included electroshock in the
anus. An ex-soldier describes the torture of his brother who was also in
the army but had not shown himself sufficiently macho and was thus
tortured to make him a man. His brother comments, "He came out half
crazy, the fucker, but we all have to learn what it takes to be a man."
Otherwise "there'd be no keeping the fuckers under control."
On the other hand, their abjection forced male prisoners to live for
the first time "as if they were women," to understand what it meant not
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politics (1985), when they speak against a unified discourse of the left,
and for diversity and discursive discontinuity.
Movements such as those of the mothers cannot be reproduced or
essentialized. If we can learn anything from them, it is that they raise
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questions which may not have a single correct answer. Perhaps the first
and most pressing is that the appropriation of democracy and family by
opposition to military regimes only came about in an extreme situation.
Secondly, we cannot yet tell even in Argentina whether these movements will continue with the same vigor when political parties and trade
unions once again are allowed to function. Will the women's which
contributed so much to this realization drop from view with the return
to normality? Third, how many of those people at present committed to
grassroots movements will be drawn back into the glamour of national
politics and into a universal discourse, the "privileged point of access to
truth" which can be reached only by a limited number of subjects?
Laclau and Mouffe say, "the classic discourse of socialism . . . was a
discourse of the universal, which transformed certain social categories
into depositories of political and epistemological privileges. . . . and as
such it reduced the field of the discursive surfaces on which it considered that it was possible and legitimate to operate." But this diversification is fragile. And what Laclau and Mouffe do not deal with in their
book is that, disarticulating family from bourgeois, political from
macho vanguard, democracy from capitalism has, in the case of Argentina not come about through theoretical breakthroughs but rather as the
aftermath of some of the harshest and most widespread repression in the
continent. We are left with the question of how many dead there will
have to be before these "archaic" formulae of Otherness are no longer
needed to manufacture the cement of society.
Acknowledgement: I am grateful to Tununa Mercado and Noe Jitrik for allowing me to use their collection of documents, particularly those of Comisin
Argentina de Derechos Humanos. I also thank Giorgio Solimano for allowing
me to consult reports circulated in Chile on the Pisagua concentration camp.
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Puig, Manuel, The Kiss of the Spider Woman (New York: 1979, Knopf)
Taussig, Michael, "History as Sorcery," Representations 7, University of California
Timmerman, Jacobo, Preso sin nombre, celda sin nmero (Barcelona, Caracas,
Buenos Aires: El Cid Editor, 1981). English translation Prisoner without a
Number, Cell without a Name
Valds, Hernn, Diary of a Chilean Concentration Camp (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975)
Vidal, Hernn, La vida por la vida. La agrupacin Chilena de familiares de detenidos
desaparecidos (Minneapolis: Institute of Ideologies and Literatures, 1982)
Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (New York-London: Oxford University Press, 1973)